Freedom [135]
“Hello, you,” she said with a warmth that made him cringe. He immediately resolved to be hard with her, but, as happened so often, she wore him down with her humor and her cascading laugh. Before he knew it, he’d described the entire scene in McLean to her, excluding Jenna.
“A house full of Jews!” she said. “How interesting for you.”
“You’re a Jew yourself,” he said. “And that makes me a Jew, too. And Jessica, too, and Jessica’s kids if she has any.”
“No, that’s only if you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid,” his mother said. After three months in the East, Joey was able to hear that she had a bit of Minnesota accent. “You see,” she said, “I think, when it comes to religion, you’re only what you say you are. Nobody else can say it for you.”
“But you don’t have any religion.”
“Exactly my point. That was one of the few things that my parents and I agreed on, bless their hearts. That religion is stoopid. Although apparently my sister now disagrees with me, which means that our record of disagreeing about absolutely everything is still unblemished.”
“Which sister?”
“Your aunt Abigail. She’s apparently deep into the Kabbalah and rediscovering her Jewish roots, such as they are. How do I know this, you ask? Because we got a chain letter, or e-mail actually, from her, about the Kabbalah. I thought it was pretty bad form, and so I actually e-mailed her back, to ask her please not to send me any more chain letters, and she e-mailed me back about her Journey.”
“I don’t even know what the Kabbalah is,” Joey said.
“Oh, I’m sure she’d be happy to tell you all about it, if you ever want to be in touch with her. It’s very Important and Mystical—I think Madonna’s into it, which tells you pretty much all you need to know right there.”
“Madonna’s Jewish?”
“Yah, Joey, hence her name.” His mother laughed at him.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “I’m trying to keep an open mind about it. I don’t feel like rejecting something I haven’t even found out about yet.”
“That’s right. And who knows? It might even be useful to you.”
“It might,” he said coolly.
At the very long dinner table, he was seated on the same side as Jenna, which spared him a view of her and allowed him to concentrate on conversing with one of the bald uncles, who assumed that he was Jewish and regaled him with an account of his recent vacation-slash-business-trip in Israel. Joey pretended to be fluent and impressed with much that was utterly foreign to him: the Western Wall and its tunnels, the Tower of David, Masada, Yad Vashem. Delayed-action resentment of his mother, coupled with the fabulousness of the house and his fascination with Jenna and a certain unfamiliar feeling of genuine intellectual curiosity, was making him actually long to be more Jewish—to see what this kind of belonging might be like.
Jonathan and Jenna’s father, at the far end of the table, was holding forth on foreign affairs at such commanding length that, little by little, the other conversations petered out. The turkeylike cords in his neck were more noticeable in the flesh than on TV, and it turned out to be the almost shrunken smallness of his skull that made his white, white smile so prominent. The fact that such a wizened person had sired the amazing Jenna seemed to Joey of a piece with his eminence. He spoke of the “new blood libel” that was circulating in the Arab world, the lie about there having been no Jews in the twin towers on 9/11, and of the need, in times of national emergency, to counter evil lies with benevolent half-truths. He spoke of Plato as if he’d personally received enlightenment at his Athenian feet. He referred to members of the president’s cabinet by their first names, explaining how “we” had been “leaning on” the president to exploit this unique historical moment to resolve an intractable geopolitical deadlock and radically expand the sphere of freedom. In normal times, he said, the great mass of American public opinion was isolationist and know-nothing, but the